Anita Patterson is Professor of English at Boston University. Her first book, From Emerson to King: Democracy, Race, and the Politics of Protest (Oxford University Press, 1997), explored how Emerson’s legacy informed the work of W.E.B. Du Bois and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In her second book, Race, American Literature and Transnational Modernisms (Cambridge University Press, 2008), she showed that Whitman, Poe, Eliot, Pound and their avant-garde contemporaries served as a heritage for Black poets such as Langston Hughes in the US as well as St.-John Perse, Aimé Césaire, Derek Walcott, and other poets in the Caribbean. She has published numerous articles on modernism, race, and interculturality, and is currently researching an American literary tradition of transpacific exchange extending from Emerson and Eliot up through the haiku-inspired poetry of Robert Hayden, Richard Wright, and Sonya Sanchez. In addition to teaching in Core, she also teaches courses in the English Department and the American and New England Studies Program.
Learn more about her research and activities at her profile page on the Department of English website.